Blogging like a hacker using Jekyll

Blogging like a hacker using Jekyll

04 Mar 2009 – Warsaw

It’s been a few days since I started this website using Jekyll since the beginning (engine like this was one of the deciding points) and I still cannot get over its awesomeness combined with (or maybe related to) its simplicity. While the idea of generating static html from half-baked partial files using maybe some sort of templating isn’t new nor original, Jekyll makes it convenient for the site owner while remaining powerful and feature-complete.

Some of this is related to Jekyll’s impressive network of forks on GitHub, with which mojombo merges regularly when asked to. I can’t summarize all these features here, as I don’t know about all of them yet, but seeing a simple commit log should give the clue.

There’s one thing that “mainstream” (i.e. mojombo’s) Jekyll still lacks and that is handling well posts’ tags and categories defined in YAML header instead of post path. I believe somewhere on github there’s a fork with that fixed and working properly (tagging in static blogging engine – wow), but I can’t find it and I’d also like to stay with vanilla Jekyll.

But hey, Jekyll is written in Ruby anyway, so maybe I could fix it myself? As if there weren’t enough forks of this project on github already. Or maybe I could play with Jekyll a bit, adding some completely new features. Or maybe implement some part of it as native extension (“related posts” functionality seems to be pretty slow). Or maybe even do it as native extension, but in D, using RuDy?